Sorry for the dearth around here, but it’s been a challenging week — the internet connection went out for 36 hours, and I started my re-entry at work, which means most of what I think about these days involves how to force a return without an indent in Quark (it’s shift/return, if you’re taking notes). Yesterday my next-desk neighbor and I discussed, at some length, whether “special-education teacher” should have a hyphen. I contended it should, which is why I just used one now. Adjectival phrases take hyphens! This is something I feel very strongly about! And now that it’s my job, I see myself penning 2,500-word essays on the topic in this very space.

Ha. Kidding. Besides, someone else thought of it first.

But now I’m home, in the cool gloom of my living room. It’s gloomy because I think it’s gonna rain, the way it’s rained 39 of the last 40 days, or something like that. We left Fort Wayne last August, one month after a summer flood some described as “freakish.” We arrived in June, in the midst of minor summer flooding, again caused by rainfall. Maybe not so freakish. (Alex has more on this.) Every day since we returned, it’s rained at least a little, and some of them have been cloudbursts where it came down so fast and hard it threatened to wash the paint off the house.

Monday, at the library, I heard a man moaning that parts of the city were flooding, “and still you see kids outside playin’ in the puddles. It’s like they don’t know we’re havin’ a disaster.”

No, they probably don’t. When you’re nine years old, a puddle’s a puddle and a flooded basement is not yet a disaster.

Since my broadband’s been down — aren’t you glad people no longer say they “broke down on the Information Superhighway” when this happens? — I haven’t even been able to comb the world for linkylicious linkage for you to follow. But! I have analog media to recommend, so y’all listen up.

I think, a few times in the last few years, I’ve pointed you to a Hank Stuever story in the WashPost. He’s my fave WashPost Style writer, and I’m almost over my all-consuming jealousy that one of his editors is the great Henry Allen. (I took a writing workshop with the great Henry Allen when I was young and impressionable, and it messed with my mind in a big way.) Well. One lesson of the internet is this: People Google their names, and sometimes they find you, and if you’re really lucky, sometimes they send you just-published collections of their journalism.

I’ve hardly minded the 36-hour internet interruptions, because I’ve been reading Hank Stuever essays and reportage on such topics as molded-resin chairs, discount funeral homes, a modern wedding and, of course, the famous Evil Queens piece.

Don’t just take it from me because I got a free copy due to my shameless sucking-up: This is a wonderful book. Buy two!

P.S. The great Henry Allen sent me his book, too, after that writing workshop, held when young Hank Stuever was still playing with Star Wars figurines. Oh my, but I loved Fool’s Mercy too. Current Amazon sales rank: 1,569,914. Well, it’s been a long time.

Among members of most baby-boom or younger adult demographics, it’s hard to find people who, er, didn’t take Nancy Reagan’s advice and feel entirely one way or the other about it. Frankly, I’ve seen this topic addressed more honestly in fiction than in non-, so I was heartened to read about “Can’t Find My Way Home: American in the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000″ in Salon this morning.

Can’t say how good the book is, but this interview with the author — you’ll have to sit through a Visa ad, sorry — is thoughtful and interesting. If nothing else, this passage made common sense:

If we really don’t start talking about drugs honestly, we’re never going to get anywhere with drug policy reform in this country.

Duh.

Rush Limbaugh is getting his third divorce. Next they’ll be telling us he has a drug problem!

(OK, I stole that line from a commenter at Atrios. Follow that link for a quick ‘n’ dirty roundup of the flaming gasbag’s thoughts on the institution over the years.)

Think Ron Reagan Jr. made any friends in the White House this weekend?

From his remarks Friday night at his father’s burial:

Dad was also a deeply, unabashedly religious man. But he never made the fatal mistake of so many politicians wearing his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage. True, after he was shot and nearly killed early in his presidency, he came to believe that God had spared him in order that he might do good. But he accepted that as a responsibility, not a mandate. And there is a profound difference.

“I know we’re home now,” Alan said. “I heard semiautomatic weapons fire last night.”

I can’t say my realization was quite that dramatic. But it was similar. Fireworks. Anyone who lives around here knows exactly what I’m talking about, why I’m still awake at 12:20 a.m., among my still-cardboard-box-strewn house, typing listlessly, avoiding bed.

The move went about as expected, which is to say, it sucked. Once again, I marveled at how many Fellows were able to make it in Ann Arbor for eight whole months on things they could carry in one car. The overseas Fellows brought two suitcases! We loaded a 15-foot rent-a-truck, and filled it full of crap. Well, we paid for it. At least the move to Ann Arbor was out of our house, into a nice flat ranch house with a driveway that allowed us to extend the ramp almost to the front door. Going back? Eleven steps up from the street to the front porch, crossing the yard, and then half the crap had to be hauled to the second floor. In about 80 percent humidity. Oh, kill me now.

Now we’re back in the house, fighting the old battles. Fireworks. Semiautomatic weapons fire. The cable guys, who came, stayed more than an hour and managed to install broadband cable that still doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. One of them was a veteran letter-to-the-editor writer — I thought he looked familiar, although I met him only once, in a Best Buy, where he recognized me when we were both looking at camcorders.

“You know anything about these?” he said.

“A little,” I replied. “What are you looking for?”

“I need a model with night vision.”

He said today he no longer writes letters to the editor, but he doesn’t seem to have changed much. “If you really want to know what’s going on in this country,” he said, “you need to buy a short-wave radio.”

Back home agaaaaain, in Indiaaaana…

The house is slowly returning to normal, the pile of collapsed boxes growing on the back porch, art back on the walls, clothes finding their way out of suitcases and into drawers. It’s starting to look the way it did before we packed it up last summer, with some differences — there’s the kilim pillow Yavuz and Nursen gave us as a hostess gift last New Year’s, here’s the glass dish we bought in Argentina, little reminders of the year. There’s a Shaman Drum bag, here’s a bunch of hangers with MICHIGAN CLEANERS on the paper wrappers. I looked up the definition of “fugue state” on the internet:

…a type of dissociative disorder in which the individual may “flee” from his or her usual life circumstances, take on a new identity and have no recollection of his or her previous life.

Yeah, it’s like that.

The other day I stopped on my bike ride to buy a loaf of bread. I was having a serious carb deficit, and with the long hill still ahead, thought I’d add an oatmeal cookie to the order.

“That’ll be…eight dollars,” the clerk said.

On the very short list of Things I Will Not Miss About Ann Arbor, that tops the list — eight bucks for a loaf of bread and a cookie. So many of the other things I was warned about have not only not been a problem, they make me question the perception of the warners.

Here’s the gist: “Oh, man, you’re not going to believe that place. Buncha liberal busybodies in your business all the time. The P.C. capital of the universe.”

True, for every “God bless and support our troops” sign you see in Fort Wayne, you see an “Another family for peace” sign here. But no busybody of any political stripe has been in my business at all, nor in any business I’ve been able to observe. You can still smoke in restaurants. Rampaging gangs of lesbians do not enforce no-leg-shaving laws. I’m sure the city council is capable of passing resolutions declaring the city a nuclear-free zone, but so what? Nearly 20 years of life in the Fort has inured me to city-council silliness. And if you see an excess of Honda Accords with bumper stickers reading “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention,” it’s balanced by the years in Indiana reading about someone’s cold, dead fingers being pried off a gun.

Yin, yang, blah blah blah. Anyway, it’s time to move.

The truck arrives in the morning and everything goes out the door shortly thereafter. We’ll be out of touch for a few days. Check back…Monday, maybe? When we’ll be back in the land of cheap bread. Dammit.

OK, so it’s self-indulgent. But when someone writes about what it’s like to be a columnist, I can identify.

Here’s something I never said to my mother when she asked, “What happened at school today?”

The conflict managers put on a show called, “American Conflict.”

Apparently it was a spoof on “American Idol.” The person with the best conflict resolution won a million bucks. (Just in case you ever find yourself in a contest like this, the winning suggestion was: “I think you should work it out.”)

Actually, there are lots of things in school today that weren’t there when I was a kid, by cracky. Here we are in the final week of class, and learning has basically stopped. The special sections — art, music, etc. — have been given over to the video, and we’re into a round of parties, celebrations and hoppin’ throwdowns.

Who decided children would learn more if they attended school for 180 days? Oh, right — legislators.

Otherwise, a hot day. Turned on the A/C, packed boxes, negotiated voice mail. Discovered I couldn’t get my old phone number back, after a mere 10 months — it’s been reassigned already. In the middle of it all, I took a bike ride. Even in the heat, the hill homestretch is now merely a nuisance, a sign that all that cottage cheese on my thighs is merely camouflage for legs of steel and wire. I can now officially kick a man to death. Don’t tempt me.

You know, I haven’t said much about Ronald Reagan. What’s the point? He had his charms and sterling qualities and was loved by millions — let them have their week. I may spend it quietly contemplating how a man whose family was a dysfunctional train wreck came to be known as an advocate for family values, how a guy who never went to church is remembered as a great Christian president, and all the rest of it. But I think we rounded a curve today, and are officially in Princess Dianaland. Behold, the prose of presidential daughter Patti Davis, who built a writing career out of first hating her parents and then being all reconciled ‘n’ stuff. She was not so upset by her father’s death that she couldn’t manage to scratch out a few lines for the chronicler of our times, People:

And as Nancy Reagan publicly showed her heartbreak, details of her final private moment with the love of her life were revealed last night as one of deep sorrow and miraculous surprise.

“At the last moment when his breathing told us this was it, he opened his eyes and looked straight at my mother. Eyes that had not opened for days did, and they weren’t chalky or vague,” Davis recalls. “They were clear and blue and full of life. If a death can be lovely, his was.”

Glad to know you got a paycheck out of it, Patti.

I’ll stop now. You all carry on.

…here’s Retrocrush’s 50 Coolest Song Parts. Song parts? Sure. You know, like the fast part of Ike and Tina Turner’s “Proud Mary” (No. 23) or the harmonica solo in the Romantics’ “What I Like About You” (No. 46). I’ve a big quibble with their No. 1, but I expect everyone’s got their own opinion.

Discuss.

When you’re a newspaper columnist you get calls from people like this all the time. They ring you up and give you their pitch: “Hi, I’m walking/running/riding my bicycle across the country this summer, to work out my midlife crisis/raise breast-cancer awareness/attend my high-school reunion. I’ll be in your circulation area tomorrow, and if you’d like to write a story about me, well, that’d be swell.”

Sometimes you do it, sometimes you don’t, but if you don’t, chances are some other poor sap on the city desk will get stuck with it. Editors love people who do this, God knows why. Occasionally they’ll have a decent story to tell, but most of them say the same things: Wow, people sure are nice. A lady invited me into her house and gave me a piece of pie! This really is a good country after all.

(Disclaimer: Occasionally people bring a different approach to the gimmick. Figures these guys are Chicagoans.)

The guy in this story is a columnist himself, so he knows the game at something of a meta level — he’s not only giving interviews along the way, he’s writing columns about it, which are appearing in some great newspapers I’m sure you’ve all heard of, like the Bradford Era (“Your Dependable News Medium”), the Titusville Herald (“First Daily Newspaper in the Pennsylvania Oil Region”), and the Chronicle, an Independent Newspaper Since 1877. You can follow the links and read them yourself, if you want. Having scanned a few, I can give you the gist: There’s a different America out there away from the hustle and bustle of the city, a place where whittling strangers call out, “Come and set a spell,” and you know what? Small towns are really different, too. People know your name in the supermarket, and that’s worth something. And that brings us back to where America is today. Something’s gained from a modern world with so many choices – but something’s lost, too. Tell it, my brother.

It so happens I have a different reaction to most small towns. I drive through a few dying farm hamlets between Fort Wayne and Columbus, and it never fails to push a little oxygen over the dying coals of my religion: Thank you, God, for not making me live here, and also for not making me grow up here. My idea of hell is having everyone in the supermarket know my name, and while I don’t mind setting a spell, I’d rather not do it with someone who’s whittling. (Mixing a blender full of daiquiris, now, that’s different.)

So it doesn’t surprise me that these stories are an easier sell in Titusville and Fort Wayne than they might be in, say, Chicago. The dwindling numbers of Americans left in tiny towns like to flatter themselves as much as New Yorkers. I only wish we could come up with something more profound than this: Prices are also cheaper, in some cases, he says, inexplicably cheaper. In a Coke machine in these parts, prices are about 50 cents. On the East Coast, a Coke will cost $1.25 to $1.50. It baffles him.

Cletus, I hear tell that in New York City, you can pay twelve dollars for a cheeseburger.